Cost Justification for Software Based Safety Solutions
Posted by
Don Brown on Mon, Nov 28, 2011 @ 11:59 AM
One of the key determining factors when thinking about Software Based Safety Solutions is justification of the expenditure. Sometimes the savings used to justify these kinds of expenditures are hard to quantify on a short term basis. Reductions in workers compensation insurance sometimes takes years to appear after the reductions in the number of accidents take place. That means that additional effort and expenses put forth to generate these reductions in accidents can add to bottom line costs in the early years of a more robust safety program.
Adding a Software Based Safety Solution should not add to your bottom line cost. Getting management and employees the most current information, policies, procedures, permits, audit results, and training information should be easy and affordable. Giving people this information in an electronic format should be more cost effective than doing it on paper. There may be some expenses associated with the transition from one method to another, but the cost on an ongoing basis should be improved with a Software Based Safety Solution.
One of the easiest ways to justify the expense is reduction in paper and filing requirements at your site. Our calculations show that each sheet of paper created and managed within most sites cost about 43.5 cents per sheet. This includes file cabinets, hanging files, folders, labels, paper, space, ink/toner, equipment maintenance, labor. An average site using around 800 sheets of paper monthly to manage their safety files would save enough annually to pay for the Basicsafe product each year.
Other sites on the web indicate that a four drawer file cabinet holds about 15,000 pages of paper and costs about $25,000 to create these documents. This same file cabinet costs $2000 annually to maintain. It costs about $20.00 to file each document. It costs about $120.00 to search for a misfiled document. It costs $250.00 to re-create a lost document.
Regardless of which numbers you choose to use, managing things on paper can be very expensive and more importantly, things on paper get out of date, cannot be easily kept up to date, and take a lot of time and labor to maintain.
An affordable solution like Basicsafe might be the right solution for you. Please contact us if you need assistance in completing a cost analysis that would assist you in identifying the cost and savings associated with a Basicsafe solution at your site. Many organizations will find that Basicsafe offers solutions that will work effectively in many parts of your organization beyond just the area of employee safety.